This might be happening to you. I’ve been conversing with people about their thoughts on the current crisis for more than one month now. We are all struggling right now in different ways. One thing that has come to my attention is the struggle with this task – The Impossible Task. This is weird. M. Molly Backes first introduced this in her viral Twitter thread. She described The Impossible Task as “something you’ve done a thousand times but has become a very difficult task”. It could be from just replying to the messages of your homies to even just accessing your class online drive ..read more

Dealing with a grieving friend Part C When we find our friends in tears, we would find it hard to resist talking and giving advice, and as a rule, listening is a practice that we should learn. It’s through listening we can effectively communicate that we see them and truly care for them. Not just the momentary act of listening However, in our journey with our grieving friends, listening to their deep feelings and understanding their struggle matter more than the momentary acts of listening. My friend would put it in this way: you don’t describe a book by its chapter but by the conten ..read more

Dealing with a grieving friend Part B It’s true that in dealing with struggles like depression, we have to deal with its underlying issues. But we previously mentioned that we are not our friends’ therapist. However, it doesn’t mean that we can do nothing to effectively help our grieving friends who are vulnerable to the beliefs of being helpless or unlovable. We can still play a major role in grounding them with reality. 1: In Words We see the phrases “it’s okay not to be okay”, “you’re not alone” and “you’re loved” all over the internet. These are not just comforting words to ..read more

Dealing with a grieving friend Part A If we want to extend help to our depressed friends, one of our primary duties is to educate ourselves about mental health and depression. We’ve seen a surge in the number of sites and FB pages about mental health awareness over the last couple of years. But we should be cautious with their implicit messages which may have serious implications. To the helping friend When we heavily subscribe to “How to talk to a depressed friend” posts we see on our screens, we are unconsciously enrolling ourselves to a free online course on therapy. “Words to Say ..read more

A quick refresher to start decluttering your headspace We launched the first leg of our book club last month, and I brought Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning”. In this book, Frankl wrote his experiences on concentration camps and went on explaining about giving meaning to our sufferings. I shared with my groupmates Rem and BJ one of the quotes that I liked in the book. We then had a good conversation about the 10/90-rule in life popularized by Stephen Covey — 10% is made up of what happens to you, and 90% is decided by how you react. Covey proposed in his book “7 Habits of Highly Effec ..read more

A friend asked me for a self-help book recommendation that could help him. He was messaging me the other night about his struggle and frustrations on his journey to self-discovery. But, aren’t we all a work in progress? We are all in the process of becoming. If we were to live with Heraclitus during around 500 BC, we would hear him saying “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” We’ve heard time and time again that the only constant thing in this world is change (don’t worry, we will not be having a short lesson in process philosophy). But, have you been courageous to accept that you are ..read more

The current pandemic has brought us into a state of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and isolation. Finding good strategies to contain the virus is a big challenge for the state and the scientific community. While waiting for this period of history to come to an end, we might be entering then into a new epidemic — the loneliness epidemic. Isn’t it that we’ve been living in a loneliness epidemic? We’ve heard a lot from the media that we are living in a lonely generation. Former U.S. Surgeon General V. H. Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness” in 2017. In 2018, U.K. strangely appointed a Ministe ..read more

Acing the interview is getting one step closer to your dream of becoming a great doctor. This article doesn’t aim to simply provide a list of interview questions — there are a lot of resources you can check online on that matter. Rather, it aims to ground you on things you should know and you can build upon for your preparation and the actual interview. If you’re going to deliver a TED talk, what could it be? “Tell us about yourself” is usually the first question; don’t miss this opportunity to introduce things that you would want to discuss further. Your interviewer might get caught up on som ..read more

There’s a famous thought experiment that raises questions among philosophers: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” In line with this, I asked myself: “If you’re at your lowest point in the darkest corner of your room and no one is around to hear it, does your grief count?” We know for sure that denying the pain is as unhealthy as someone trying to minimize it — acknowledging it is in no way a sign of weakness. Everyone has his or her own story of going through hurting. Some days, we go through suffering just by ourselves, preferring to endure the ..read more